An Armchair of Dissent

By Richard George

I should say how proud I am of myself, my origins, my existence as a White, Anglo-Saxon, English, British, Christian, Anglican middle-class male of a certain age... but I cannot.

This book is a journey into my past, Britain’s past, by someone—me—who is profoundly uncomfortable with it and with the present in which it has resulted. It is selective, quirky and ordinary, using information openly available to anyone via the internet. It reveals a story of the triumph of arrogant superiority and brutal expediency in defence of a morally indefensible regime of minority domination. Its realities have been fictionalised into a tale of institutionalised glory and civilised advance of human society that denies the frailty of the human psyche and the deadly savagery, self-seeking greed and single-minded pursuit of power that is my inheritance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley
• Release date: Aug 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463489222

Richard George

Rich George is the owner and managing director of NOI Coach, a business coaching, consulting and training firm based in Michigan. A successful business person and published author with over 25 years of experience, Rich brings a no-nonsense approach to strategic planning and a passion for employee development and culture building. Rich's background includes the management of over two billion dollars of real-estate assets, and over 50 million dollars of capital re-investment strategies. Rich has been involved with successful acquisitions, dispositions, merger facilitation, and repositions. Key to his portfolio is the management of highly distressed properties, including those in court receivership. Rich attended Wayne State University and is a licensed Real Estate Broker. He has been recognized by his peers as a leader in the industry serving in many different rolls within the National Apartment Association and is a current member of the NAAEI Faculty as well as the MHLI Faculty. Rich was recognized as one of the first graduates of the Leadership Lyceum and has received the honor of the CAPS, CDPM, CDUHM, ARM, and the CHPE designations. Rich's "no-nonsense" approach to problem solving has helped companies accomplish their goals, as well as turnaround seriously distressed properties. His passion for the industry, and dedication to the "people" part of the business, has caused him to be known for building some of the greatest property management teams ever assembled. Known for his team building, culture changing, and change management skills, Rich leads the market in promotion and preservation. To Contact Rich: E-Mail: [e-mail] Phone: [phone] www.noicoach.com

Book preview

Foreword

If this book ever reaches an intellectual height more than that of a dinner conversation among reasonably mature, informed, articulate friends or a round-table or bar-stool-linear chat over a pint or a Pimms, then it will fail. If I had any pretension to intellectual debate, spiritual insight or political conviction, I would not be writing it. Nevertheless, I invite those who do to read it. I am not an interpreter of truth or a revealer of the mysteries of the universe. I am more of a disciple of idiom, a purveyor of clichés. To define such expressions of human feeling and experience as ‘overused’ smacks of some fear of the relevance of them, not to the meaning of life, maybe, but to its morality, how we might best conduct it. We are all part of God’s creation. You only have one life. Love your neighbour. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Practice what you preach. Are they too simple to be of use? Are they too ‘right’? Are they discredited by elites because they express the social expectations of the ordinary person? This book is my design, my compilation of the words of others, of facts readily accessible to anyone who cares to Google them. For me, it was a voyage of discovery as any good conversation should be. It rambles and digresses but, I hope, it goes somewhere. Any questions that it asks, any challenges that it throws up are there in one form or other in any social group anywhere on this planet. Please join me on my winding journey through time and place and share my love of history too. This journey is also the story of my life, the factual details of which are no more interesting than any other of the billions that this planet has witnessed and no more universally significant. We all share this miraculous being, existing, experiencing, sensing, emoting moment in time and wonder at its meaning. I have found my answers in the lives of others, extraordinary lives that have not only elucidated the insignificance of my own moment in time but the gloriously significant possibilities for which every human being is created.

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Introduction

I grew up in the 1950s and those of you in your sixties or seventies will remember, every 24 May, celebrating Empire Day, learning the history of Britain via its heroes, Drake, Marlborough, Clive, Wolfe, Nelson, Wellington, Gordon, Rhodes and Churchill and imbibing and memorising the geography of the world made flat by the barely-discernible map on the wall, the most obvious feature of which was the ubiquity and dominance of its pinkness. My favourite book was Kipling’s Just So Stories and my favourite poem, If, by the same author. I voraciously gobbled up stories of the all-conquering British defeating the French, Spanish, French again, Russians, Turks, Indians, Zulus, Boers and, of course, Germans. Agincourt, the Armada, the Year of Victories (1759), Trafalgar, Waterloo, Balaclava, the Somme and D-Day were my weekly ego-boosting fix. I am writing this in 2015, a date so redolent of those heady days, being the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta (15 June), the 600th of Agincourt (25 October) and the 200th of Waterloo (18 June). Until my late teens, therefore, I never doubted the rightness and justice of the British civilising mission to enlighten, modernise and educate those distant, dark continents through imperial rule.

From the age of six, I went to church every Sunday, often twice when I had been confirmed, and for some years to Sunday school in the afternoon. The power and beauty of the language in the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Anglican hymns and prayers overwhelmed me with visions, requirements and stories, the examples and demands of which I felt totally inadequate to follow and which I saw very little sign of being followed either by my fellow worshippers or the world of people outside that magical, powerful house of spiritual and moral purity and sanctity. This experience gave birth to scepticism and disillusionment rather than the intended acceptance and certainty. Over the altar were the words I stared at every Sunday: ‘GOD IS LOVE’ – 1 John 4:8, ‘He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love’. The most powerful influence on my sense of Christian humanity, however, was this prayer (of St Ignatius Loyola):

Teach us, good Lord,

to serve you as you deserve,

to give and not to count the cost,

to fight and not to heed the wounds,

to toil and not to seek for rest,

to labour and not to ask for any reward,

save that of knowing that we do your will.

Amen.

The stories of Jesus were THE example, to any young listener, of kindness, compassion, rejection of the importance of possessions, self-sacrifice and acceptance of the importance of all human beings. Why, my young mind questioned, in a Christian church, in a Christian world, don’t I see many examples of these qualities?

In 2005, as a gift to my brother for his sixtieth birthday, I drew up our family tree. Having a distinctly German sounding family name, Feist, it had always been assumed that there was a foreign dilution of our family’s Englishness. Not so. The outcome of my researches seemed to confirm that, on both sides of my ancestry, I am undiluted Anglo-Saxon (Feist being a spelling of Fiste, meaning exactly what it appears to mean), a rare enough thing given the multi-ethnicity and multiple heritages of these islands.

Therefore, I am English, British and Anglican; well-off, educated and civilised; a product of the very Establishment that has civilised the world. My ancestors, whose blood is flowing in my veins, were there! The world of which they were a part, however unwittingly or powerlessly (I have found no movers or shakers whatsoever in my forbiddingly ordinary and mundane forbears), is a part of me, an undeniable, unavoidable, genetic, anthropological link to the past that I share with all humankind. I am a product of the biology, the society, the politics, the economics and the ideology of what has gone before.

Now—pausing for breath as I dissect and interrogate this amazingly incontestable truth—I should say how proud I am of myself, my origins, my existence as a white, Anglo-Saxon, English, British, Christian, Anglican middle-class male of a certain age...but I cannot. To do so would deny the overwhelming emotion that has resulted from my life’s experience and learning. I feel ashamed; shame—a negative emotion that combines feelings of dishonour, unworthiness, and embarrassment. I am in mourning for the pride that could have been.

Man was made to mourn: A Dirge

Many and sharp the num’rous ills

Inwoven with our frame!

More pointed still we make ourselves

Regret, remorse, and shame!

And man, whose heav’n-erected face

The smiles of love adorn,

–Man’s inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn!

— Robert Burns

What I have found, however, in the compilation (the words, ideas, opinions, inspiration, genius and humanity in this book belong to others) of what is to follow is some sort of catharsis. I am not alone! That being so, I am in search of some sort of redemption, some seeds of pride in the history of who I am.

In 1998, something exceptional began to happen to me that set me apart from most of you. By 2002, what was happening to my body was given a name—motor neurone disease. From a slight limp and occasional lisp, it progressed to an inability to walk without a frame, and then only 10 metres or so without exhaustion, and a significant slowing of speech and abnormal prosody (that sing-song quality that makes speech become interpersonal communication). Forced to give up the job I loved, teaching, I firstly discovered the Open University with whom I did an English degree and secondly, the Internet. So much good can come from this life-changing source of knowledge and, of course, like all human experience, a fair measure of ‘bad’. It challenges the monopoly that academia had on knowledge and enables a different, more populist approach to sharing it. It is this approach to history that I have taken, with a greater emphasis on the ‘story’ bit. If someone else can say it better than me, I have used their words. It is the story that matters, not the wisdom of its presenter. Everything that I have used can be found by using that browser thing. If any of the facts are incorrect, over or under represented or emphasised, mea culpa!

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PART I

The United Kingdom

United you will be more than a match for your enemies. But if you quarrel and separate, your weakness will put you at the mercy of those who attack you.

— Aesop, Aesop’s Fables

The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas.

— Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

"Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me."

— Napoleon Bonaparte

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Chapter 1

Ethnology: What is Country?

"There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity."

Robertson Davies

Ethnology: ‘The study of ethnic groups: the comparison of different cultures, or the study of how and why cultures differ. Ethnology can focus on one culture through time or several cultures at the same time’.

The theory that enables us to explore the concept of ‘country’ owes much to a remarkable scientist and observer of humankind, Bronisław Malinowski (Broniswaf Malinofski, if my understanding of Polish pronunciation is correct). Malinowski was born in Kraków in what is now southern Poland but in 1884, the year of his birth, was in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1908, he gained his doctorate at The Jagiellonian University in Kraków, one of the oldest universities in the world. Inspired by The Golden Bough by James Frazer, which he read while recovering from tuberculosis, he went on to study anthropology at the University of Leipzig. In 1910, he came to London to conduct research at the British Museum and study at the London School of Economics. In 1914, he left England for four years of field work in New Guinea and north western Melanesia with brief respites in Australia.

A few weeks among the Motu of Papua gave him his first actual contact with a primitive people and provided him with a preliminary acquaintance with the Motuan language, which he used in a much more extensive period of field work among the Mailu. His first ethnographic report, The Natives of Mailu (1915), despite disclaimers by Malinowski of its importance, clearly foreshadows the contributions to theory and method which he was to make in his later and more famous volumes on the Trobriand Islanders, and stands out in favourable contrast to the work of his ethnographical predecessors in the New Guinea area. More than two years of intensive field work in the Trobriand Islands, in 1915-16 and 1917-18, enabled Malinowski to assemble the materials for those classic works of anthropological description and interpretation upon which his reputation largely rests: Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926), The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929), and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935).2.

Dr Malinowski contributed three very important ideas to understanding human behaviour. I think that they can be explained in everyday terms without diluting the expertise of his scientific analysis.

Firstly, he said that social behaviour is designed primarily to meet the basic needs and drives of human beings. I take this to mean that if we could eat, drink, survive and reproduce better as an individual or in small family or kinship groups we would not have formed the larger social groups that, over time, have become towns, cities and countries. Satisfying these basic human functions gives rise to secondary needs such as economic cooperation, education and social control. These basic and secondary functions can be found in all human groupings but how they are met gives rise to many actions and behaviours—Malinowski calls them ‘imponderabilia’—which differ from group to group. These different approaches, when shared by individual members of a group, become a culture, a shared set of behavioural approaches. However different cultures have become as they have evolved over time, their core functions, i.e. what drives them, are carried on to meet the basic and secondary needs which are universal to all human social groupings.

I really take to Malinowski’s approach, known in anthropological circles as ‘functionalism’, because it cautions us not to overcomplicate our attempts to understand why human beings do what they do and, more importantly still, not to be too surprised or judgemental in our reaction – ‘There, but for the grace of God, go we’.

Secondly, unlike his inspiration, Frazer—who, apart from visits to Italy and Greece, was not widely travelled, collecting his data from questionnaires sent all over the world—Malinowski believed that if fields of study of social phenomena, such as social anthropology, are to be scientific, then they must be based on analysis of real-life data. This data should be collected in field studies that involve being with, living with and, as far as possible, being a part of the culture which you want to observe. There are some slight hints of doubt about the extent to which Malinowski practised what he preached, but his books show clear evidence of intensive participant observation of the Trobriand culture and its practices. Furthermore, he recognised the importance of separating the subjective perspectives on what was being observed of the observer/analyst/theoriser/scientist from those of the actors, which means that you should not read more into what you observe, rather trusting what you see (Inspector Morse has taught me the same lesson!), and, more importantly, should not do bad science by making the data fit the theory instead of vice versa.

We often bemoan the lack of empathy with the reality of social conditions shown by politicians. I would recommend a good deal more participant observation!

Thirdly, Malinowski talked about institutions. Murdock’s excellent article explains his use of the term better than I can (I’ve changed the American spellings and highlighted some key terms but can assure you they are Murdock’s words).

‘The collective life of any society,’ he pointed out, ‘is largely manifested in a series of organized systems of behaviour, or institutions, which provide the most satisfactory units for investigation in field work. Upon analysis, he believed, any institution resolves itself into six interrelated elements: (1) personnel, a group of individuals cooperating in the performance of a common task; (2) material apparatus, the artefacts employed in their activities; (3) norms, the rules or ideal patterns to which behaviour is expected to conform; (4) activities, the behaviour, including deviation from norms, which actually takes place in the performance of the joint tasks; (5) charter, the express cultural definition of the common aims or purpose of the institution; and (6) function, the actual effect of the collective enterprise in satisfying human needs. Institutions work on the principle of reciprocity, i.e. if you do your bit for the institution, others will support and reward you by what they do. A change in one or more of the six elements brings about change in one or more of the others. It is this reciprocity principle that binds individuals to institutions. They give up their individuality for the comfort, protection and functional advantage offered by the institution. However, institutional norms can submerge personal values and the institutional charter can supersede personal scruples to the extent that institutional activities replace or become entirely separate from personal or unrelated institutional activities. Institutional insanity or inhumanity, such as that which occurred in Nazi Germany, would, in an individual or an institution other than the State, have been quickly dismissed by widespread social disapproval which explains, I think, our tendency to concentrate on Hitler rather than the conditions under which the Nazi regime was able to institutionalise, even legalise, racial extermination.’3.

Nothing lasts forever. Never say ‘never’. Institutions give a temporary permanency to cultural forms but one of the six elements is always changing, likely to change or be forcibly changed. Three things were certain when I took my 11+ in 1960—there would never be a Labour Government, there would always be a Cold War and no British man would ever win Wimbledon. Along came Wilson, Gorbachev and Murray. Who’d have thought?

Having a large family of Polish in-laws, I am especially delighted to meet Bronisław Malinowski. I was particularly interested to learn that, being an Austrian citizen and, therefore, technically an enemy of the British Empire, the Australian authorities still allowed him to conduct his field studies in what was then an Australian Protectorate. He seems to me to have been an early twentieth century David Attenborough, without the interest in as many living creatures. I am sure Sir David must have an opinion on Malinowski and his work which I would love to hear. He was atypical of his time, which was so Eurocentric in its concerns, although colonialism was obviously a part of Europe’s problem in two respects, namely that he was a true citizen of the world and, more importantly, very lucky or percipient to be absent from Europe in its darkest hours. He became a British citizen in 1931. This brief acquaintance with him reminds me that there is a lot of world out there beyond the frontiers and shores of Britain that we, as Britons and Europeans, would do well to start learning about and understanding before it not only knocks on our door, as it already has in the form of considerable immigration, but also moves into our neighbourhood in the form of economic, political, social and cultural competition, parity and eventual superiority.

I have always had a fascination for that recruitment poster with the moustachioed face of Kitchener shouting ‘YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU’. Whose country? Whose war does it need me for?

My generation, the generation of Dylan and the Beatles, asked these questions, of course, making Kitchener’s image, Lennon’s words—Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for—and Dylan’s brilliantly succinct analysis of The Great War—The First World War, boys / It came and it went / The reason for fighting / I never did get / But I learned to accept it / Accept it with pride / For you don’t count the dead / When God’s on your side—feed my bewilderment with the whole country/nation/race issue and contribute to my negative feelings about my Britishness.

I want to understand patriotism, love of country, in the sense of what binds people to a country to the extent that they sing hymns to inspire them to win at sport, say prayers for its leader and, confident that God approves, fight and die for its expansion or its defence.

Communities, in the form of villages, towns, cities, colonies and settlements have died or been destroyed by nature or by human actions. My favourite example of such disappearances is the pre-1832 Reform Act existence (or non-existence) of Rotten Boroughs such as Old Sarum with its 3 houses and 7 voters or Dunwich with its 44 houses and 32 voters due to its subsidence into the sea, so brilliantly parodied in the BBC’s Blackadder the Third episode ‘Dish and Dishonesty’ as Dunny-on-the-Wold which returned Baldrick as its MP by 16,472 to nil despite Blackadder being the only voter!

Nations consist of people who share the same ethnic and linguistic origins regardless of whether they live in a single country or are dispersed, by choice or by circumstance, into different territories other than their homeland.

A country, on the other hand, is a sovereign state, a geographical area whose citizens, regardless of their race, ethnic origin, nationality or cultural and communal ties, accept the rule of a single government. Countries do not occur naturally; being institutions constructed by men, they can be undermined, corrupted and destroyed by men.

Using myself as an illustration, I am human by clade (a group of organisms, for example a species that are considered to share a common ancestor), a homo sapiens by sub-species, Germanic by ethno-linguistic grouping, English by nationality and British through my citizenship of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I’m glad I have that clear, although, never having heard of a ‘clade’, I wouldn’t take my analysis as academically accurate. All this makes me different from an orangutan, a Kalahari bushman, a Scot and a Frenchman but, in universal terms, it also makes me incredibly similar. Which do I celebrate, the difference or the similarity?

Footnotes of chapter 1

2. Murdock G.P., 2009, American Anthropologist, Volume 45, Issue 3. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1943.45.3.02a00090/pdf. Accessed 14/09/2015.

3. Ibid.

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Chapter 2

The United Kingdom

"I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice."

― Albert Camus

"How does one hate a country, or love one? ... I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks; I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is the love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing."

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Many of you will wonder where I am going with this precise, probably pedantic, distinction between ‘country’ and ‘nation’—my wife certainly does—but it has played such an important role in European history and, in the cases of Spain and the UK, for instance, where different nations have been unified into a single country (willingly or unwillingly?), could have a real bearing on these two countries’ futures.

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Whether they do so for selfish or cooperative motives, human beings form collective groups for survival. Having the unique faculty of speech, they can pervert its purpose of communication by using it for deception, a proven survival technique. Yes, they lie. We all lie. However, they must create collective institutions that require behaviours that can be easily undermined, if not destroyed, by deception. A country cannot work without loyal behaviour; it requires soldiers who will fight and die for its survival; it requires law-enforcers who will maintain the social control necessary to its survival and it requires citizens who will obey its laws, approve and pay for its wars and any other services it provides. One way to ensure this is through fear: fear of Hell for breaking a promise to a God greater than any human power (religion), fear of death and by extension a horrific death, e.g. hanging, drawing and quartering, or mutilation (capital or corporal punishment), loss of freedom (imprisonment) or, in times gone by, loss of citizenship (banishment). Loyalty can also be bought, of course, through financial reward or promotion of status (e.g. mercenaries, military honours, grants of titles and/or wealth). Combined with some or all of these is an act of oath swearing, promising to do what you contract to do. As a divorcee, I’ve no right to pronounce on keeping a promise but I will continue the theme regarding citizenship.

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You will have noticed that these oaths are not sworn to a country but to a person, in the case of the UK in 2015, its Queen, Elizabeth II. This personification of the supreme power that governs a country requires a great deal of paraphernalia to reinforce it—propaganda, ritual, symbol and language—giving a spiritual significance to a man-made worldly institution. Nowhere is this more apparent than at a coronation. Even I do not remember the last one in the UK on 2 June 1953 but it was filmed and televised and is, as a remarkably interesting and increasingly unique event, well worth a look on YouTube.

The reason for its growing uniqueness is that there are only eleven monarchies left in Europe. The papacy is an elective monarchy; Andorra is a dierarchy, the second co-prince being the President of France; Luxemburg, a Grand Duchy; Liechtenstein and Monaco are principalities; leaving just six kingdoms: Belgium, a popular monarchy (King Philippe is King of the Belgians not King of Belgium), Denmark (Queen Margrethe II), Netherlands (King Willem-Alexander), Norway (King Harald V), Spain (King Felipe VI), Sweden (King Carl XVI Gustav) and the UK. Three of these monarchs have only recently acceded to their positions, King Philippe and King Willem-Alexander in 2013 and King Felipe in 2014 (incidentally, not only are the latter two the youngest monarchs in Europe but, at 1.97 m, surely King Felipe is in contention for being the tallest Head of State in the world!). I apologise. I’m a great fan of factual trivia. All these three monarchs were not crowned but inaugurated, as the President of a Republic would be, indicating that their kingship is an office of state, bound to the state by the swearing of an oath but not the personification of the state, nor does it involve coronation.

Traditions have grown up around the inauguration of Presidents and various bits of ritual and regalia in various monarchies, such as enthronement, crown jewels, acclamation, benediction and investiture, have been retained but in the UK, we get the lot: religious observance, acclamation, investiture, anointment, coronation and homage, everything possible to bind sovereign to subject, leader to led, one person to the whole country, temporal and spiritual. The rite of coronation makes the Crown the ultimate symbol of the UK, the symbol of country and the symbol of the bond of loyalty, monarch to people and people to monarch.

Let Wikipedia describe the show.

‘Attendees include foreign and Commonwealth dignitaries as well as Britons, some of whom participate in the ceremony directly. For Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, 7,500 guests were squeezed into the Abbey and each person had to make do with a maximum of 18 inches (460 mm) of seating.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, who has precedence over all other clergymen and over all laymen except members of the Royal Family, traditionally officiates at coronations; during his absence, another bishop appointed by the monarch may take his place. There have, however, been several exceptions. William I was crowned by the Archbishop of York, since the Archbishop of Canterbury had been appointed by the Antipope Benedict X, and this appointment was not recognised as valid by the Pope. Edward II was crowned by the Bishop of Winchester because the Archbishop of Canterbury had been exiled by Edward I. Mary I, a Catholic, refused to be crowned by the Protestant Archbishop Thomas Cranmer; the coronation was instead performed by the Bishop of Winchester. Finally, when James II was deposed and replaced with William III and Mary II jointly, the Archbishop of Canterbury refused to recognise the new Sovereigns; he had to be replaced by the Bishop of London. Hence, in almost all cases where the Archbishop of Canterbury has failed to participate, his place has been taken by a senior cleric: the Archbishop of York is second in precedence, the Bishop of London third, the Bishop of Durham fourth and the Bishop of Winchester fifth. Elizabeth I was crowned by the Bishop of Carlisle (to whose see is attached no special precedence) because the senior prelates were either dead, too old and infirm, unacceptable to the queen, or unwilling to serve.

The Sovereign wears a variety of different robes and other garments during the ceremony:

Crimson surcoat – the regular dress during most of the ceremony, worn under all other robes. In 1953, Elizabeth II wore a newly made gown in place of a surcoat.

Robe of State of crimson velvet or Parliament Robe – the first robe used at a coronation, worn on entry to the Abbey and later at State Openings of Parliament. It consists of an ermine cape and a long crimson velvet train lined with further ermine and decorated with gold lace.

Anointing gown – a simple and austere garment worn during the anointing. It is plain white, bears no decoration and fastens at the back.

Colobium sindonis (‘shroud tunic’) – the first robe with which the Sovereign is invested. It is a loose white undergarment of fine linen cloth edged with a lace border, open at the sides, sleeveless and cut low at the neck. It symbolises the derivation of Royal authority from the people.

Supertunica – the second robe with which the Sovereign is invested. It is a long coat of gold silk which reaches to the ankles and has wide-flowing sleeves. It is lined with rose-coloured silk, trimmed with gold lace, woven with national symbols and fastened by a sword belt. It derives from the full-dress uniform of a consul of the Byzantine Empire.

Robe Royal or Pallium Regale – the main robe worn during the ceremony and used during the Crowning. It is a four-square mantle, lined in crimson silk and decorated with silver coronets, national symbols and silver imperial eagles in the four corners. It is lay, rather than liturgical, in nature.

Stole Royal or armilla – a gold silk scarf which accompanies the Robe Royal, richly and heavily embroidered with gold and silver thread, set with jewels and lined with rose-coloured silk and gold fringing.

Purple surcoat – the counterpart to the crimson surcoat, worn during the final part of the ceremony.

Imperial Robe of purple velvet – the robe worn for the conclusion of the ceremony, on exit from the Abbey. It comprises an embroidered ermine cape with a train of purple silk velvet, trimmed with Canadian ermine and fully lined with pure silk English satin. The purple recalls the imperial robes of Roman Emperors.

In contrast to the history and tradition which surround the Regalia, it is customary for most coronation robes to be newly made for each monarch. The present exceptions are the supertunica and Robe Royal, which both date from the coronation of George IV in 1821.

The Sovereign enters Westminster Abbey wearing the crimson surcoat and the Robe of State of crimson velvet.

Once the Sovereign takes his or her seat on the Chair of Estate, the Garter Principal King of Arms, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Great Chamberlain, the Lord High Constable and the Earl Marshal go to the east, south, west and north of the Abbey. At each side, the Archbishop calls for the Recognition of the Sovereign, with the words,

Sirs, I here present unto you ..., your undoubted King (Queen). Wherefore all you who are come this day to do your homage and service, are you willing to do the same?

After the people acclaim the Sovereign at each side, the Archbishop administers an oath to the Sovereign. Since the Glorious Revolution, the Coronation Oath Act of 1688 has required, among other things, that the Sovereign promise and sweare to governe the people of this kingdome of England and the dominions thereto belonging according to the statutes in Parlyament agreed on and the laws and customs of the same. The oath has been modified without statutory authority; for example, at the coronation of Elizabeth II, the exchange between the Queen and the Archbishop was as follows:

The Archbishop of Canterbury: Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon, and of your Possessions and other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs?

The Queen: I solemnly promise so to do.

The Archbishop of Canterbury: Will you to your power cause Law and Justice, in Mercy, to be executed in all your judgments?

The Queen: I will.

The Archbishop of Canterbury: Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolable the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?

The Queen: All this I promise to do. The things which I have here before promised, I will perform, and keep. So help me God.

The monarch additionally swears an oath to preserve Presbyterian Church government in the Church of Scotland. This part of the oath is taken before the coronation.

Once the taking of the oath concludes, an ecclesiastic presents a Bible to the Sovereign, saying, Here is Wisdom; This is the royal Law; These are the lively Oracles of God. The Bible used is a full King James Bible, including the Apocrypha. At Elizabeth II’s coronation, the Bible was presented by the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Once the Bible is presented, the Holy Communion is celebrated, but the service is interrupted after the Nicene Creed.

After the Communion service is interrupted, the crimson robe is removed, and the Sovereign proceeds to King Edward’s Chair, which has been set in a most prominent position, wearing the anointing gown (In 1953, King Edward’s Chair stood atop a dais of several steps.). This mediaeval chair has a slot in the base into which the Stone of Scone is fitted for the ceremony. Also known as the ‘stone of destiny’, it was used for ancient Scottish coronations until brought to England by Edward I. It has been used for every coronation at Westminster Abbey since. Until 1996, the stone was kept with the chair in Westminster Abbey between coronations, but it was returned that year to Scotland, where it will remain on display in Edinburgh Castle until it is needed for a coronation.

Once seated in this chair, a canopy is held over the monarch’s head for the anointing. The duty of acting as canopy-bearers was performed in recent coronations by four Knights of the Garter. This element of the coronation service is considered sacred and is concealed from public gaze; it was not photographed in 1937 or televised in 1953. The Dean of Westminster pours consecrated oil from an eagle-shaped ampulla into a spoon with which the Archbishop of Canterbury anoints the Sovereign on the hands, head, and heart. The filigreed spoon is the only part of the mediaeval crown jewels which survived the commonwealth. The Archbishop concludes by reciting a blessing.

The Sovereign is then enrobed in the colobium sindonis, over which is placed the supertunica.

The Lord Great Chamberlain presents the spurs, which represent chivalry. The Archbishop of Canterbury, assisted by other bishops, then presents the Sword of State to the Sovereign. The Sovereign is then further robed, this time receiving bracelets and putting the Robe Royal and Stole Royal on top of the supertunica. The Archbishop then delivers several Crown Jewels to the Sovereign. First, he delivers the Orb, a hollow golden sphere set with numerous precious and semi-precious stones. The Orb is surmounted by a cross, representing the rule of Jesus over the world; it is returned to the Altar immediately after being received. Next, the Sovereign receives a ring representing the ‘marriage’ between him or her and the nation. The Sceptre with the Dove (so called because it is surmounted by a dove representing the Holy Spirit) and the Sceptre with the Cross (which incorporates Cullinan I – Author’s note: On 21 November 1909, Cullinan I and II, were formally presented to King Edward VII at Windsor Castle. These are the two largest colourless and flawless cut diamonds in the world. They were temporarily mounted as a brooch for Queen Alexandra, but after the King Edward’s death in 1910, King George V commanded that Cullinan I, known as the ‘First Star of Africa’, be set at the head of the Sovereign’s Sceptre, part of the Regalia made for Charles II. 4 are delivered to the Sovereign. As the Sovereign holds the two sceptres, the Archbishop of Canterbury places St Edward’s Crown on his or her head. All cry God Save the King (Queen), placing their coronets and caps on their heads. Cannons are fired from the Tower of London.

The Sovereign is then borne into the Throne. The Archbishops and Bishops swear their fealty, saying I, N., Archbishop (Bishop) of N., will be faithful and true, and faith and truth will bear unto you, our Sovereign Lord (Lady), King (Queen) of this Realm and Defender of the Faith, and unto your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God. The peers then proceed to pay their homage, saying I, N., Duke (Marquess, Earl, Viscount, Baron or Lord) of N., do become your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and truth will I bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks. So help me God. The clergy pay homage together, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Next, members of the Royal Family pay homage individually. The peers are led by the premier peers of their rank: the Dukes by the Premier Duke, the Marquesses by the Premier Marquess, and so forth.

If there is a queen consort, she is anointed and crowned in a simple ceremony immediately after homage is paid. The Communion ceremony, interrupted earlier, is resumed and completed.

The Sovereign then exits the Coronation Theatre, entering St Edward’s Chapel (also within the Abbey), preceded by the bearers of the Sword of State, the Sword of Spiritual Justice, the Sword of Temporal Justice and the Sword of Mercy (the last has a blunt tip). The Crown and Sceptres worn by the Sovereign, as well as all other regalia, are laid at the Altar; the Sovereign removes the Robe Royal and Stole Royal, exchanges the crimson surcoat for the purple surcoat and is enrobed in the Imperial Robe of purple velvet. He or she then wears the Imperial State Crown and takes into his or her hands the Sceptre with the Cross and the Orb and leaves the chapel while all present sing the National Anthem.5.

I’m far more of a republican than a monarchist. It strikes me as unfair for one person to have so much more power than any other and unjust to spend so much on one family when there is so much poverty, not only in the country that that family governs, not by merit but by inheritance, but in the world, but I’ve always been fascinated by all this stuff. If I had a special subject for Mastermind, it would have to be ‘The British Monarchy 1066–the present day’. I couldn’t write anything to do with my life without including this lifelong fascination.

If a country is more than a geographical area under a single government, and I am still not sure that it is, if it, possibly over time, acquires a cultural distinctiveness that makes Le Guin’s notion of ‘uncountry’ a reality in the mind and spirit of those who live within it, then Britain would be the archetype. It would be hard to define ‘Britishness’ without subjectivity and in such a way that would stand up to even the most casual critique. However, in millions of hearts and minds it exists, defining the ‘uncountry’ that does not have it and colouring the perception of it that those in the ‘uncountry’ share, with a remarkable unanimity I think, no matter where they live. Furthermore, if any single thing demonstrates Britishness it is the coronation and, although it fascinates me as a spectacle—the sheer history that pervades it seeps from its pores, making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end—it also makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

I know that the United Kingdom is sometimes seen as an argumentative and rather strong-minded member of the family of European nations. And it’s true that our geography has shaped our psychology. We have the character of an island nation—independent, forthright, passionate in defence of our sovereignty. We can no more change this British sensibility than we can drain the English Channel. And because of this sensibility, we come to the European Union with a frame of mind that is more practical than emotional.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2013 speech, one of his best, was full of historical references to a history that I am going to explore on the next leg of my journey to see whether the pride in, the immutability of and, in that last phrase, the righteousness of Britishness is something to be proud of or not.

Footnotes of Chapter 2

4. https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/exhibitions/cullinan-i-the-sovereigns-sceptre. Accessed 04/10/2015

5.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_of_the_British_monarch. Accessed 30/09/2015.

***

Chapter 3

The British Breed

"The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life."

— Winston Churchill

"His anxiety for money is the only thing on which he can deservedly be blamed. This he sought all opportunities of scraping together, he cared not how; he would say and do some things and indeed almost anything, unbecoming to such great majesty, where the hope of money allured him. I have here no excuse whatever to offer, unless it be, as one has said, that of necessity he must fear many, whom many fear."

— William of Malmesbury Historia Anglorum

"A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others."

— Antony Beevor

It is too easy to accept the official history of this country and move on. I believe that history is something that should promote self-awareness and understanding of the complexity and variability of human behaviour, a fascination but, at the same time a warning—‘Nothing new under the sun’; ‘History repeats itself’ etc.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was created primarily, by conquest—subjugation of enemy after fighting: taking control of a place or people by force of arms. Whatever happened before 1066, in terms of fighting between English, Welsh, Scots and Irish, its causes were economic at their most serious and territorially indecisive tribal rivalries and brigandage at their most petty. Expansion of territory was often fortuitous and hard to maintain. A strong unifying force for the English was the repulsion of invasions from Vikings—from Norway, Denmark and Ireland—and Scots. There were strong confederations of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under an overlord like Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, or his grandson, Aethelstan, a Mercian who became King of the Anglo-Saxons and then King of the English, whose victory against an Irish-Scottish invasion at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 CE possibly saved the country or, at least, the concept of England (Wikipedia cites Michael Livingston: It would be no small stretch to consider the battle the moment when Englishness came of age. The men who fought and died on that field forged a political map of the future that remains with us today, arguably making the Battle at Brunanburh one of the most significant battles in the long history not just of England but of the whole of the British Isles.6.)

When these collective groupings failed, the Viking land-grab was completed; Canute becoming King in 1016 only confirmed the Danelaw (Viking England since Alfred’s time) and some other lands north of the Thames. Edmund Ironside was left as King of Wessex and all lands south of the Thames including London. Edmund, however, died soon after the treaty was made, and Canute was acclaimed and crowned King of England by all the Anglo-Saxon nobles. Although some unreliable ones were executed, as, indeed, were unreliable Viking nobles, there was no wholesale replacement of Anglo-Saxon or established Viking nobles by the new regime. England, not for the last time, remained the country of ‘England’; but with a foreign king.

By the way, there is a strong possibility that Canute’s mother was Polish, a daughter of Mieszko I of Poland, so, even a 1000 years ago Poles were coming over here and doing ‘our’ jobs!

The Norman Conquest, however, was different. William, whose liege lord, King Henry I of France, had helped him gain control of Normandy and bordering counties such as Flanders, Maine and Brittany, wanted a kingdom of his own and the homage of his own noble subjects. I do not think that schoolchildren learn enough about Anglo-Saxon England to appreciate what a prize it was for a band of adventurers such as those who accompanied William. They intended to acquire other people’s land by displacing them by right of conquest. Land meant wealth. Good, fertile, productive land with trading links, prosperous towns and rich religious institutions meant great wealth. The disputed succession, the battle at Hastings and the Domesday Book are interesting chapters from the first volume of British history and well worth learning at school but they are not the essence of the beginning of the history of Britain, the country, and they do not explain the importance of the behaviour patterns of this period that are definitive markers in the evolution of Britishness.

It could be helpful to go back to Malinowski’s analysis of collective behaviour, institutions and the principle of reciprocity; idiomatically, ‘You don’t get something for nothing’, ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch’. The Norman victory at Hastings meant the complete replacement of the institution that was Anglo-Saxon England with a new one that was Norman England, soon, in historical time, to incorporate Norman Wales and Norman Ireland and insinuate a significant Norman influence into Scotland. The most radical change was in personnel. Wikipedia tells us:

‘A direct consequence of the invasion was the almost total elimination of the old English aristocracy and the loss of English control over the Catholic Church in England. William systematically dispossessed English landowners and conferred their property on his continental followers. The Domesday Book meticulously documents the impact of this colossal programme of expropriation, revealing that by 1086 only about 5 per cent of land in England south of the Tees was left in English hands. Even this tiny residue was further diminished in the decades that followed, the elimination of native landholding being most complete in southern parts of the country.

Natives were also removed from high governmental and ecclesiastical office. After 1075, all earldoms were held by Normans, and Englishmen were only occasionally appointed as sheriffs. Likewise, in the Church, senior English office-holders were either expelled from their positions or kept in place for their lifetimes and replaced by foreigners when they died. By 1096, no bishopric was held by any Englishman, and English abbots became uncommon, especially in the larger monasteries.’7.

The composition of the two opposing forces at Hastings tells us who went and who came, who lost and who won. Harold’s forces were largely made up of the fyrd, a force of free landholders, who supplied their own weapons and armour, largely fighting to defend their own locality but fighting for a king if necessary; nobility, relatives of Harold, royal officials and large landowners, ealdormen, high reeves and thegns, who may have brought their own retainers, and house carls, professional soldiers paid directly by the king, of Anglo-Saxon and Danish ancestry and better trained and armed than the fyrd. Apart from the latter group, most of Harold’s army were free Englishmen (there was considerable slavery in Anglo-Saxon society) fighting in defence of the land of their birth.

William’s army was made up of Bretons, led by Alan the Red, Normans, consisting of his family, particularly his half-brothers, Bishop Odo of Bayeux and Robert de Mortain and their retainers, his feudal vassals, like William FitzOsbern, Lord of Breteuil, with land who, in return for holding their land, promised to provide soldiers to fight for their feudal lord. Most significantly there were many nobles without land (in the age of primogeniture, when land and wealth passed to the first son, subsequent sons had to pray or fight for a living). William led these Normans himself. Finally, William, as a feudal vassal himself of the King of France, could call on numerous French allies, mostly from his immediate neighbours in Flanders, Picardy and Boulogne whose Count, Eustace II, was a former brother-in-law of Edward the Confessor, with whom there had been a falling out a few years before, and renowned seeker of fortune who probably provided naval expertise and ships for the enterprise. FitzOsbern and Eustace led these troops. There are two reciprocities at work here. Firstly, the feudal system is best understood as a protection racket; pay me (the overlord) a percentage of your livelihood and I will protect it; don’t pay me and I will take it away. Secondly, the mercenary’s and adventurer’s code operated on a principle something like this: fight for me and I will pay you in land that I will confiscate from the losers when you win my battles for me (no win, no fee!) and gold or silver for every day I employ you; oh, and all you can steal to which I will turn a blind eye until I restore law and order.

As an example of the land-grab deal behind the Conquest we can see, in general terms, what the leading supporters got. Odo was made Earl of Kent. The Bretons did well. Alan the Red was made Earl of Richmond in Yorkshire. Another Breton, Ralph de Gael, was made Earl of East Anglia. William FitzOsbern was made Earl of Hereford, Gloucester, Worcester and Oxford. Eustace was granted an Honour in England, large areas of land, manors, scattered throughout the country. Wikipedia says of Robert de Mortain’s holdings:

‘Robert’s contribution to the success of the invasion was clearly regarded as highly significant by the Conqueror who awarded him a large share of the spoils; in total 797 manors at the time of Domesday. However, the greatest concentration of his honours lay in Cornwall where he held virtually all of that county and was considered by some the Earl of Cornwall. While Robert held lands in twenty counties, the majority of his holdings in certain counties was as few as five manors. The overall worth of his estates was £2100. He administered most of his south western holdings from Launceston, Cornwall, and Montacute in Somerset. The holding of single greatest importance, however, was the rape of Pevensey (east Sussex) which protected one of the more vulnerable parts of the south coast of England’.8.

William’s cousin and chief counsellor, Roger of Montgomery, may or may not have fought alongside him at Hastings but was also well rewarded with the Earldom of Shrewsbury.

‘Roger was thus one of the half dozen greatest magnates in England during William the Conqueror’s reign. William gave Earl Roger nearly all of what is now the county of West Sussex, which at the time of the Domesday Survey was the Rape of Arundel. The Rape of Arundel was eventually split into two rapes, one continuing with the name Rape of Arundel and the other became the Rape of Chichester. Besides the 83 manors in Sussex, his possessions also included seven-eighths of Shropshire which was associated with the earldom of Shrewsbury, he had estates in Surrey (4 manors), Hampshire (9 manors), Wiltshire (3 manors), Middlesex (9 manors), Gloucestershire (1 manor), Worcestershire (2 manors), Cambridgeshire (8 manors), Warwickshire (11 manors) and Staffordshire (30 manors). The income from Roger’s estates would amount to about £2000 per year; in 1086 the landed wealth for England was around £72,000, so it would have represented almost 3% of the nation’s GDP’.9.

If we then consider the lesser nobles, common soldiers and Norman officials brought in to govern at a local and national level, we get a figure of around 8000 Norman newcomers—more, probably, than the English natives who died at the battle of Hastings and in the subsequent rebellions. It is difficult to imagine what the combination of grief, feelings of failure and subsequent expropriation and replacement of government must have felt like in the heart and mind of the average Englishman. I cannot help feeling that, for the nobility it was all part of the game. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose; sometimes you are loyal, sometimes you betray; sometimes you fight, sometimes you treat; sometimes you bend the knee, sometimes you rebel—the politics of expediency and self interest.

There is some evidence that Anglo-Saxon society was moving towards the European/Norman model of feudalism anyway. There is evidence that the Normans reduced slavery, whether for moral or economic reasons, but serfdom in Norman England does not sound like the most attractive lifestyle. Free tenant farmers and former slaves, maybe even petty nobles, all ended up in the same class. On a practical level, they exchanged one lord for another. It was not their land that they farmed and never would be.

William, in essence, retained the existing system of justice and taxation, so, in addition to protection, there was still law and order. He did introduce one life-changing measure, Forest Law, which made large swathes of land (not just forests as we now know them), up to a third of southern England, and several meat sources—deer, boar—exclusively the preserve of aristocratic or royal, rather than common, hunters. Yes, this is sounding very ‘Robin Hood’. Contrary to the legend, people not only lived on this land but could glean food from it, providing it was not one of the prohibited game animals, but were punished for trespassing, exceeding their rights, under separate law from the common law but rarely sentenced to death or blinded.

Peasants were all holders of land for which they paid rent. Tenants-in-chief rented substantial land and were largely free to do with it what they wanted, including producing a saleable surplus. At least five things could have happened after Hastings; they made agreements with their new lord, as many did with Alan the Red in Richmond; they died at Hastings and their widows or children were replaced by a newcomer; their tenure was confiscated and given by the lord to a newcomer; they intermarried with the newcomers (this definitely happened in the nobility) or they rebelled and were killed, dispossessed or went abroad (Scotland, Ireland and the Low Countries were popular but the Byzantine Empire was the Spain of medieval British ex-pats).

‘The largest single exodus occurred in the 1070s, when a group of Anglo-Saxons in a fleet of 235 ships sailed for the Byzantine Empire. The empire became a popular destination for many English nobles and soldiers, as the Byzantines were in need of mercenaries. The English became the predominant element in the elite Varangian Guard, until then a largely Scandinavian unit, from which the emperor’s bodyguard was drawn. Some of the English migrants were settled in Byzantine frontier regions on the Black Sea coast, and established towns with names such as New London and New York.’10.

Slaves worked directly for the lord, being his property but they also cost him money to feed, clothe and house. Between these two in this feudal society came serfs, villeins, who were largish landholders, and bordars or cotters, who only had enough land to feed their own family. Serfs paid rent for their own land but also worked the lord’s land in return for the services of protection and justice he provided. ‘The Domesday Book showed that England comprised 12% freeholders, 35% serfs or villeins, 30% cotters and bordars, and 9% slaves.’11.

The point about the activities of this new class is that they had to work for their lord as well as work for themselves and the norm was that if there was a clash, the lord’s needs came first. To continue with Malinowski’s ideas, the feudal ‘charter’, therefore, introduced a hierarchical chain of duty because not only did the serf’s duty to the lord take precedence over his own needs but the lord’s duty to the king did likewise. The ‘function’ of the institution we call the feudal system was to feed everyone in the population of the country, especially the food producers. Whatever fighting the lord was doing—rebellion, neighbour disputes, civil war or foreign war—Napoleon’s saying was always the bottom line: An army marches on its stomach. The 4th century Roman writer on military strategy, Vegetius, said: It is better to overcome the enemy by famine, raids, and terror tactics than by battle, in which luck has more influence than courage.

William, probably the most able and experienced military strategist of his time and almost certainly a follower of Roman military strategy, followed this advice to the letter in 1069–70 when Edward’s nephew, Edgar the Aethling, led a rebellion of the northern earls, mainly of Danish ancestry, with outside Danish help. William did not have the numbers to fight a pitched battle, so he bought off the Danes and made sure the north could not feed itself, let alone a rebellious army, by killing serfs, burning crops and farm buildings and slaughtering livestock, especially oxen capable of pulling a plough—brutal, practical expediency. This harrying of the North, as it has become known, took lives of peasants to get at their lords. Edgar Aethling lived until 1126. Other rebel earls like Gospatric, Edwin and Morcar all lived in exile in Scotland or abroad but never returned to their lands which were given to Normans, Norman supporters or the Church.

Scorched-earth policies such as this or those aimed at preventing an enemy from living off the countryside were a familiar part of warfare in Europe for many centuries until the advent of modern army logistics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the modern epitome of the horror of destroying the lives of ordinary people to affect their overlord.

‘The strategy of destroying the food and water supply of the civilian population in an area of conflict has been banned under Article 54 of Protocol I of the 1977 Geneva Conventions. The relevant passage says:

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.’12.

In the Wikipedia entry on ‘genocide’, it fully quotes M. Hassan Kakar from a paper he wrote on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:

‘For genocide to happen, there must be certain preconditions. Foremost among them is a national culture that does not place a high value on human life. A totalitarian society, with its assumed superior ideology, is also a precondition for genocidal acts. In addition, members of the dominant society must perceive their potential victims as less than fully human: as pagans, savages ...In themselves, these conditions are not enough for the perpetrators to commit genocide. To do that—that is, to commit genocide—the perpetrators need a strong, centralized authority and bureaucratic organization as well as pathological individuals and criminals. Also required is a campaign of vilification and dehumanization of the victims by the perpetrators, who are usually new states or new regimes attempting to impose conformity to a new ideology and its model of society.’13.

If this statement were a part of a War Crimes trial in the aftermath of the Norman invasion on whether the Harrying of the North and the complete replacement of the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Danish nobility were acts of genocide it would stand as a powerful piece of theoretical analysis for the prosecution. The Normans were a new regime, totalitarian by nature, with a new feudal model of society and a centralized bureaucracy so effective that many Norman nobles were absentee landlords (William spent more than 75% of his reign away from England). The feudal culture they brought with them did not place a high value on human life (of low class humans, that is), as demonstrated in the Harrying of the North. For hundreds of years, nobles tried to defeat nobles but, if possible, not to kill them because to ransom them was far more profitable or to hold them hostage as a lever in any post-conflict